A graduate of the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Valladolid, Mónica Diago began her professional career in Madrid at the studio of architect Gregorio Marañón and interior designer Eva Longoria, where she took part in residential and public projects of national and international scale. She later collaborated with landscape architect María Medina on major commissions, including the master plan and landscaping of Abengoa’s Campus Palmas Altas in Seville —a project by Richard Rogers—, the Eastside Gibraltar master plan, and the Ciudad del Motor de Alcañiz competition, both designed by Foster & Partners.
In 2011 she founded Mónica Diago Arquitectura y Diseño, a Madrid-based studio specialising in comprehensive renovations and residential interiors, and launched El Taller de las Cosas Bonitas, a platform devoted to decoration and lifestyle that became a space for creative workshops for companies, children and adults.
In 2021 she co-founded Lumier, a boutique developer focused on the transformation of singular homes in Madrid. Lumier works with a team of architects, interior designers and builders on carefully selected projects, offering a full turnkey service: from the selection of properties in prime locations to design, renovation and final interior fit-out. The strategic use of light defines the identity of its homes —noble materials, bespoke kitchens, sustained attention to detail— with the aim of creating spaces that generate wellbeing and a distinctive character.
More recently, Diago has created Diago Home, a furniture and decoration brand born of her collaboration with local craftspeople. “The DNA of Diago Home grows from the search for a serene, timeless design that is honest with its materials,” the architect explains. Marble, wood and fine textiles are the protagonists of a hand-crafted collection in which the mark of manual work remains visible in every piece. The cabinetmakers, shaped over generations in the knowledge of wood —its grain, its rhythm, its character—; the marble workers who know how to read the geological memory of each surface; the upholsterers from family workshops, passing the precision of their craft from parents to children: all of them are an essential part of the project.
Diago Home is not simply a furniture collection. From its founding, the brand has assumed an explicit commitment to the preservation of artisan trades in Spain. The concern over the lack of generational succession in crafts that form part of the country’s cultural identity has given rise to the Diago Home Scholarship Programme, launched in collaboration with IES León Felipe in Torrejón de Ardoz, through which the firm funds and supports the training of new apprentices in trades such as cabinetmaking, stonemasonry and upholstery. A small gesture, in the architect’s own words, to return to craftsmanship the cultural value it must not lose — and to build the future of design from there.